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During the first months in the city she found herself texting her old friend Camilla back in Oslo, but increasingly her reports from home seemed so terribly vapid they made Sybille feel trapped — as though Camilla’s uninteresting life acted as an obstacle to Sybille returning to Oslo even as her escapist plans in Berlin feel somehow blocked. The result is that these Facebook Messenger chats seem to take place in an awful, claustrophobic non-place. Even now she can’t imagine returning there, to the boring bars and crushing routine, the faces she always has to pretend not to recognise, the forced estrangement from other bodies in space. And yet at the same time she knows she will eventually, inevitably, one day return.

Read an excerpt from The Trains of Europe by John Holten.

I never worked my first job at the house barb wire came from. That was in high school. We lived in a little rented place and barb wire came from an old mansion two blocks down. I could walk there in three minutes, but I didn’t. Performance anxiety, social anxiety. The training sessions went badly. I mumbled too much, my posture was awkward. I didn’t like the touch of the brass faces I had to tug to open doors and cabinets. The metal was cold, I expected cobwebs; as soon as I slid my fingertips up their mouths I heard a sound, a groan or simply a noise, for which there was not always an explanation. Each room had a clock with a chime so low it seemed to come from elsewhere—from inside my body, perhaps; not from works concealed by a sky, a sun, and a moon. The door to the conservatory opened itself. The palms had a Victorian rectilinearity. The horse in the attic didn’t move. It was snagged on a barb wire fence.

A short story by Addison Zeller.

On my heels, following, I can hear them, they’re after me, I’ve always known, I could always tell, but told myself no, those are the footsteps of other people, they are after somebody else, following somebody else, now I know there is no one else, they can’t have been following or ever followed someone else, always after me and me alone, that is who they want, what they’re after, I know, I can tell, listen, so close, where are they, so close to me, clamouring, reaching out, almost to touch, nearly within reach, whether I am crawling, or climbing, or clambering, or standing, now and again, from time to time, on occasion, I feel them, feel their touch, feel the grazing contact of their claws or fangs or whatever they might be snapping at my heels, but they aren’t there whenever I turn my head aside to look, but that doesn’t preclude them from being there, no, as I can only turn my neck, my head, so far as to get a glance of them in my periphery, I cannot turn around fully, I cannot make my neck bend one hundred and eighty degrees, and so see what is directly behind me, beneath me, at my heels, I cannot stop and turn, I cannot turn around, they will pounce on me in an instant, the second I stop, before I am able even to turn, they will be on top of me, they will have brought me down…

A short story by Sam Glover.

They set up their instruments as if walking on the moon or in a vat of invisible molasses, their hair hanging loose and stringy like black threads or beaded into some ropey ponytail, their fingers more knuckley bone than flesh. Of course they were dressed in the usual black, but such a uniform and unforgiving black as if their clothes had soaked up the night. There was a blackness behind the blackness.
And there was a sound behind the sound. The silence behind the silence.
The blackness behind the blackness.

Read an extract from The Rachel Condition by Nicholas Rombes.

The giant orphan girl stood at the entrance to the carnival, handing out lollipops.

Lolly? she said, tap dancing.

No, said every single person who passed by. Mothers hissed. Children latched onto the giant orphan girl, swinging from her shoulders until she lost balance and fell to the ground. Also, they stole her lollies.

A short story by Skyler Melnick.

On the first day of the first month one year after his parents bought him his first bicycle William Soskill a boy of below average intelligence had his skull fractured when a one-eyed bald eagle dropped onto his head a one-legged pit bull it had abducted from a junkyard in Brooklyn.

A short story by David Sheskin.

close-up: of hand over hand, tentative, a brief squeeze, one of them disengages as the camera pans up to find two people crying, we can tell from her expression it’s the first time she’s ever seen tears on his face but not the first time he’s brought them to hers…

A short story by JP Seabright.

You see, before I met Charlie, I lived in a world I didn’t understand or trust. I still don’t, in fairness, but back then I really didn’t see the point of anything. The bad thing—that happened when I was a kid—influenced this to a certain extent, but it would be remiss of me to attribute all my shortcomings to that moment. No, my perception of the world was shaped over many, many years. Don’t worry: I’ll spare you the details of what molded my personality. Just be assured that those experiences left me feeling very disillusioned with life. It was all aspects of life too, not one thing in particular; not the big or the small, or the irrelevant, but everything. Everything just seemed so empty and stupid and pointless.

A short story by Christopher Farrington.